Marvel Masterworks Artwork To Benefit The Hero Initiative

LOS ANGELES, CA – Artist Mike Kelleher will appear on November 17th at the Hyaena Gallery, in Burbank CA during his Marvel Masterworks Reconstruction series of Silver Age collections showcase. A number of original art pieces will be on display from November 16-31, 2006 with sales benefiting The Hero Initiative, a charitable organization that helps veteran comic creators in need.

Each drawing is an exact recreation of the original works created by legendary artists Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, John Buscema and many others. Each piece, measuring 14 x 17 inches, was painstakingly reproduced to mimic line-weights and styles of the original artists and inkers.

These pieces are not simple recreations made for fans and collectors. Every drawing was commissioned and approved by Marvel Comics for publication in the Masterworks Collections. Marvel Comics has gone to great lengths over the past few years to give fans EXACT reproductions of the silver age stories that made Marvel famous. Often times the film that was used in the original printing process were either lost, damaged, or altered, so a new version needed to be created.

When Mike Kelleher first began reconstructing artwork for the Masterworks books, he did them all digitally and the results were amazing, but he felt that they were too "smooth" and "mechanical" looking when compared to the pages shot from original film. The simple remedy was to recreate the images in ink on paper, at twice the printed size, just as the original artists did almost 50 years ago. The result is a much truer representation of the original printings.

"I can't think of a more fitting tribute to the artists that I idolize than to use the recreations of their artwork to benefit comic creators," Kelleher said.